The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Thursday, April 30, 2015

Torture at Gitmo? Blame Jordan!

There was a nasty dustup on Twitter between the Glenn
Greenwald forces and sympathizers with Bashar al Assad concerning the case of Maher Arar—a Canadian citizen who was deported by the US to
Syria, where he was detained for 9 months and tortured (he describes his
treatment here)--and
whether Syria under Assad had assisted the US in its torture/rendition
projects.

Much wroth was waxed on the issue over Assad-as-a-US-accomplice
vs. Assad-as-anti-imperialist.

I’m going to tiptoe past that issue to highlight some
interesting information about the role of Jordan in US
rendition/interrogation/torture projects.

Perhaps Arar elicits the disapproval of pro-Assad forces
because he has used the publicity gained by his mistreatment to engage in
anti-Assad agitation.When Arar appeared
on Democracy Now! his profile stated:

He now works as a
human rights advocate in Canada. “The cooperation with the Syrian government,
as well as other dictatorships in the Middle East post-9/11, gave some kind of
legitimacy to those dictatorships,” says Arar. He calls on the United States
and the United Nations to declare the Syrian regime illegitimate and refer the
matter to the International Criminal Court.

In the interview, Arar highlighted the odious character of
the Assad regime as follows:

Now, why the — and let
me also say that when the American government sent me to Syria, they knew
exactly what they were doing. In fact, I can vividly remember what an ex-CIA agent said around 2004 about the rendition program. He
basically something said like — if I remember correctly, his is name is Robert
Baer. He said, "If you want people to be well interrogated, you send them
to Jordan. If you want people to be disappeared, you send them to Egypt. And if
you want people to be tortured, you send them to Syria."

I recently read the heavily-redacted Guantanamo Diary of
Mohamedou Ould Slahi.It is an eloquent
and fascinating document.It also
demonstrates the pitfalls of relying on the received wisdom & privileged
narratives of ex-CIA agents whose primary experiences with torture are perhaps
gleaned from chitchat in the offices eager-to-impress-and-please-and
facilitate-and favorbank security bureaucrats in distant lands.

Slahi was rendered from his home in Mauritania in late 2001 by
the US to Jordan for detention and interrogation and we can see with good
confidence, the Jordanians do torture, just not routinely and reflexively:

Jordanians practice
torture on a daily basis, but they need a reasonable suspicion to do so.They don’t just jump on anybody and start to
torture him…In the beginning the Jordanians were seen as a potential associate
for doing the dirty work; the fact that Jordanians widely use torture as a
means to facilitate interrogation seemed to impress the American
authorities.But there was a problem:
the Jordanians don’t take anybody and torture him; they must have reason to
practice heavy physical torture…I learned later from the Jordanian detainee in
GTMO who spent fifty days in the same prison…that they do have…painful methods
of torture, like hanging detainees from their hands and feet and beating them
for hours, and depriving them from sleep for days until they lose their minds.

“In Jordan they don’t
torture unless they have evidence…The torture starts around midnight and
finishes around dawn.Everybody takes
part, the prison director, the interrogators, and the guards…”

In February 2002, the
director of Jordan’s Antiterrorism Department was the subject of an
assassination plot…The investigation led to a suspect, but the secret police
couldn’t find him…The peaceful brother was to be taken as a pawn and tortured
until his brother turned himself in.Special Forces were sent out, arerested the innocent boy in a crowded
place, and beat him beyond belief…The boy was taken to the prison and tortured
every day by his interrogator.“I don’t
care how long it takes, I am going to keep torturing you until your brother
turns himself in,” his interrogator said.

So Jordan tortures.But they’re selective.(Judging
from Arar’s account, the Syrians are less finicky and cut to the chase
immediately, beating him brutally for two weeks to extract a bogus confession, perhaps
as a matter of convenience, since they apparently quickly determined that the
US dossier was without foundation.They finally
released Arar after over a year of inhumane detention.).

According to Slahi’s account, Jordan’s insufficiently
gung-ho attitude irked the US and perhaps contributed to the idea that the US
had to develop and manage its own in-house torture apparatus rather than rely
on the Jordanians:

“September 11 didn’t
happen in Jordan; we don’t expect other countries to pry Intels off detainees
as we do,” [redacted] said once.The
Americans obviously were not satisfied with the results achieved by their “torture
allies.”

Slahi was detained and interrogated for eight months in
Jordan without being physically tortured (psychologically, of course, another
matter), since the Jordanian intelligence services considered the US dossier on
him was, like Arar’s in Syria, BS.

This
was not good enough for the United States, which was sure,
apparently incorrectly, that Slahi was an Al Qaeda kingpin; they shipped him to
Guantanamo (where he is still imprisoned today) and tortured him using the
notorious regimen of sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, stress positions
(and disregard for his sciatic condition and medication needs), temperature
manipulation, forced water drinking, slaps, beating, psychological abuse, threats
of execution and the imprisonment and abuse of his family, and the bizarre
sexual humiliation gambit.

The sex stunt involved women fondling and rubbing up against
him, and talking dirty and maybe more (Slahi, a devout and puritanical Muslim,
does not give all the details); the women were either NCOs in the US Army,
which seems, well, incredible, or hookers maybe flown in from Miami.Slahi’s allegations, by the way, were
confirmed years ago in an ignored report by released British Gitmo detainees,
who asserted that women smeared them with what was supposed to be menstrual
blood and engaged in similar sexual provocations, as well as by several subsequent
US government investigations.If anybody
knows if this is a unique US breakthrough in interrogation science, or if it
has a precedent in the Middle East, Russia, China or elsewhere, please let me
know.

Long story short, everybody tortures.So leave Bashar Assad
aloooooooooooooooooone!Well, I wouldn’t
go that far, but it seems unlikely that Syria was involved more than
peripherally in the US GWOT global rendition/detention/interrogation/torture
regime.Jordan, it appears from Slahi’s
account, was at the system’s heart, and indeed was the primary US asset in
navigating the Arab world and in providing precedents and best practices for
interrogation…and torture.

And also, I guess we can blame the Jordanians for being so
stingy with their precious torture and forcing US to set up the enhanced
interrogation system at Gitmo.

2 comments:

What is more important, the torture of a few or the possible mass murder in Syria? I therefore have to support Syria against the US/Turkish/Saudi Arabian jihadis and head choppers. If Assad falls there will be a bloodbath on a scale not seen since WW2. My people, the Armenians, are in the cross hairs of the choppers and liver eaters. I condemn the West for backing such evil.